Left: People duck and scatter as 'rubber' bullets and live ammunition slice up the street. In the background, ambulances wait to take injured demonstrators to Ramallah hospital. Photo by Yasser Darweesh.

People often ask those of us who live and work out here why people go to demonstrations where Israeli troops open fire, and so endanger their lives? After four years of living here, two of which followed these particularly severe clashes, with their high level of people killed, I genuinely do not know. One Palestinian friend I asked this question asked me, "What else can we do?"

I suspect it has something to do with the daily humiliation at checkpoints and a feeling of powerlessness in the face of ever-progressing Israeli land confiscation, which combine to build to unimaginable levels of frustration and tension. In addition, everyone has a personal grudge to settle. There isn't a Palestinian family anywhere that hasn't somehow been harmed by the occupation.

Right: Demonstrators carry one of the wounded to a nearby ambulance. The injured man appears to be wearing a Palestinian Police uniform. This injury was to make the Palestinian Police decide to open fire in return, something that would catch the Israeli soldiers completely by surprise, and mark the first ever countrywide armed confrontation between the Israeli Army and the Palestinian Police. Photo by Yasser Darweesh.

What we would hear almost immediately from Israeli government spin doctors was the refrain, "How could they open fire at us with weapons we had given them?" In fact, the Palestinian Police brought their own weapons with them into the country as agreed by the Oslo accords.

No Israeli government spokesman ever acknowledged their army's excessive use of force. Out of the 88 Palestinians killed countrywide during these clashes, mostly on this first day, all but a handful were shot with live ammunition to the chest and head.

If you're standing watching unarmed demonstrators get mowed down (263 injured passed through Ramallah hospital on this first day) there is only so long you can resist using the rifle in your hand to try to stop it.

Left: Even the route to the ambulances was dangerous. The injured demonstrator reaches the ambulance safely. Photo by Yasser Darweesh.

As these clashes spread to the rest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, ambulance workers were to repeatedly come under fire from Israeli troops. A few were shot dead.

This happened despite their wearing white coats. In Gaza, one paramedic was shot dead while carrying an injured demonstrator to his ambulance.

This is not something that happens by accident. Israeli rifles have telescopic sights mounted on them. When several uniformed medical personel are shot in the chest and head by live ammunition, this clearly can not be a 'coincidence'.

Right: Some demonstrators used mobile sheilds, here a rubbish skip, to protect themselves. We joked later, when we saw this photograph after Israel stationed tanks on the hills surrounding Ramallah, that this was a "Palestinian tank". Photo by Yasser Darweesh.

Even with sheilds such as these, the demonstrators were not that close to the Israeli soldiers as to offer a "life-threatening situation". Reports of the behaviour of the Israeli soldiers during this time, covering in a later entry, demonstrate the lack of fear they clearly felt in this situation.